It was morning.
Guin's eyes were blinded by the cold, wet nose pressed hesitantly against his chest and hand. What he saw was a huge wolf, its golden eyes peering at him in the morning sun, its whole body glistening with pure white as if it had been crystallized from alpine snow.
"I've been dreaming."
He did not show the slightest sign of surprise at seeing it. He said to the Wolf King as if he had spent many years reigning with the Wolf King over the wolf pack on Dogtooth Mountain.
"In that dream I was a king. I had a glorious crown on my leopard's head and the purple robe of a king on my shoulders in the temple of Janus. People were calling my name - then the dawn star tried to escape from my hand and I followed it, defying the people's warning. I threw away my crown, my staff and my robe and became a naked warrior again. Then, somewhere on the way, in the middle of a straight red road, there appeared a strange old man with one eye, a long beard, a triangular hood and a goatee from the waist down, striking me with a crooked staff. He blazed red with his single eye and said, "Fool! Come back, come back and take back the dragon's throne! Come back and take back the dragon's throne!"
Guin raised his hand and scratched his round head sagely.
"Was it none other than the loom, the old yarn, that wove destiny?"
Of course, the old wolf did not answer. Instead, he rubbed his nose against Guin's arm in a friendly gesture, trying to draw her attention to the breakfast he had prepared for her.
Guin laughed, patted the wolf on the head in appreciation, peeled off the rock lizard's skin, split the vacha fruit in two, and made breakfast. In spite of all his adventures and hard fighting, his strong limbs were well-rested, full of strength, and refreshed from fatigue.
The wolf king watched him with satisfaction as he devoured his food with a voracious appetite. This infinitely old wolf had a strange mixture of humanity and beastliness, as well as a transcendent quality that was neither of the two.
When he had finished, the Wolf King looked up at him as if to ask, "May I? He looked up at him as if to ask, "May I? Then he pressed his nostrils against his arm again and suddenly began to walk briskly.
Guin looks on wistfully. Seeing that he did not move, the wolf, impatient, came back again, this time with a gentle tug on Guin's wrist, being careful not to make any teeth. Then he walked again in the same direction, towards the top of the Dog's Head Mountain. His white bushy tail swayed.
"This is a surprise. You're going to show me the way?"
Guin said.
"Is that why you were sent to Yarn? Do you know I have to return to Shem with the Lagonese reinforcements in two and a half days? Then maybe you're not sent by Yarn... but one of a hundred manifestations of him. By the way, the beard of the old man in my dream this morning was as white as yours."
The great tornado of sandstorms that carried him up to the foot of Mount Gutou, as well as this Wolf King, were indeed divine intentions to make him do something.
But Nosferus is a land forsaken by the gods. Tornadoes happen all the time, and it may be that the tornado was heading east and coincided with his direction. Also, it may be a little too easy to think that the Wolf King is acting in this way because of the divine will. After all, everything may be the result of chance. It is a well known fact that beasts, especially sacred beasts such as wolves, develop strange abilities when they get very old.
--Guin thought to himself, chastising himself for his unnecessary overly mystical gaze, but in the meantime, he stepped out to follow the Wolf King, keeping a watchful eye on the area.
The wolf king turned to see if he could follow him a little further. When he saw that Guin was following him a little further away, he was satisfied and quickened his pace somewhat. Even so, he was probably slowing down a lot. As he did so, after every five or six tarts, he looked back a little.
Guin sped up to match the Wolf King's pace. The path was uphill and led directly to the summit of Dogtooth Mountain. As its name implies, the mountain resembles a dog's head, and at its summit there are spiky rocks on either side of the mountain that are almost like ears, between which the dog's head passes in a narrow pass.
It was at the pass that the Wolf King and Guin had set their sights. Last night, when they had been chased by the wolves and had struggled to get through the rocky terrain, they had climbed up to the top of the mountain, but the path that snaked up from the mountain's edge was farther than they had expected.
The two ears of the summit seemed as if they were right in front of them, but no matter how hard they walked, they could not reach the summit.
And they hastened on in silence. And Guin, too, though the Wolf King had no way of speaking, exercised that mysterious patience which only wild beasts possess, and without stopping to wipe off his sweat or to catch his breath, he climbed over the rocks with his hands when they blocked his way, and when he came to a precipice, he carefully stepped over the rocks beside him and hurried on.
The surrounding scenery was also not soothing to the climbers. Originally, Mt. Gutou is a rocky mountain of Nosferus, and although it is a part of the Canaan mountain range, it stands alone and far from the main body of the range. Its height is not comparable to the high mountains of Asgarun and Canaan. However, since it is surrounded by the desert of Nosferus, it is noticeable even from a distance.
This rocky mountain is like a giant dog that has grown into a rock after living in Nosferus for many years. It is inhabited by wolves and various other inhabitants, but it does not have a single green tree that can be used as a source of moisture. Rocks, Japanese knotweed, and gray mosses - only occasionally a short strip of shrubbery, mostly thorny vashas, quickly ended, leaving behind another bleak bald mountain.
It was a difficult journey, but also one in which the monotony and bleakness of the landscape lulled the walker into a strange kind of stupor and numbness.
The hard, bare ground after the rocks have been cut is tinged with the same gray as that of the wolves of Nosferus, and it seems to refuse to allow any flowers or plants to sprout there. A gray rock lizard scurries across the ground. Rock lizards, slender viper snakes, and insects are probably the main food of the wolves of Gutoushan.
Where were all the wolves that had been so numerous? Not one of them even dared to show itself to their king and this intruder.
Soon the sun was high in the sky. In Nosferus, where there is nothing to mitigate the effects of the heat, the transition between the cold of the night and the heat of the day is extreme. At the top of the mountain, the night is even colder, but this does not mean that the daylight loses its heat.
The fact that the ground in this area is so dry that it does not even allow moss to grow on it is probably the result of the repetition of such a process, in which the ground is scorched by the sun and the temperature drops rapidly at night.
In the monotonous grayness of the road, Guin was intoxicated with a vague sense of intoxication, as if it were a dream sequence, and was thinking about such things.
Truly, this is an inhospitable land. The world holds various wonders and unknowns, some of which are so wondrous that mankind cannot even solve a part of their mysteries. However, this strange land of Nosferus was not only unexplored and harbored strange creatures, but also had some kind of strange will in it.
In other words, this place called Nosferus, this barren land where only vast deserts and rugged rocky mountains, bordered by two rivers, the Kes and the Los, covered the whole world, was itself a huge and bizarre creature, and even the id, the glutton, and the sandstorm were, so to speak, parasites of this huge monster. In Nosferus, there was a kind of demonic "unnaturalness", as if the id, the cannibal, and even the sandstorm were merely parasites on this huge monster.
Of course, neither Guin nor the expeditionary force of Mongol who set foot on this land thought of it in these terms.
However, the fact that they could not put it into words made their understanding even more real, and it was an intuition that came close to their skin.
Something is wrong in Nosferus. Not only the ecosystem, flora, and fauna, but more than that, there is a crazy distortion in the region itself, Nosferus, which brings about such ecosystem.
But Guin knew that the land had not always been mad. He did not know why, but when he thought of Nosferus, that knowledge came to his mind as naturally as his knowledge of the Middle Lands and the Semitic language.
(Nosferus was not always a cursed, demonic land inhabited only by hairy barbarians.)
Guin thought to himself. The Wolf King rubs himself against Guin's legs without any hesitation.